This is PaTeX, my personal TeX format. It is

• a learning experience for me, as I get to know how basic convenience mechanisms can be implemented in TeX in principle;
• a format I can use to create specialized documents, as I know exactly what which macro does, allowing me full control over the document;
• potentially useful as a demonstration of or even source of inspiration for how to do things in virgin TeX.

It is not

• any close to a fully fledged format offering the capabilities of e.g. LaTeX; in fact, it doesn't even contain all the plain.tex macros, yet;
• an example of high quality TeX coding;
• well-documented, user-friendly, or bug-free.

Following is some documentation, especially for my future self. Feel free to use it as you wish, though.

Installation

1. Clone this repository into ~/texmf/tex/.
2. Execute the bash script ini/makepatex. This creates the fmt files and puts them into ~/texmf/web2c/{tex,pdftex,xetex,luatex}/ only if the respective directory exists.
3. Execute the bash script bin/link. This creates the binaries and links them to files in ~/bin/, where I store my user bash scripts.

Usage

After the above installation procedure, the following binaries are available:

binary	running on	default output
virpatex	Knuth's TeX	dvi
epatex	e-TeX	dvi
pdfpatex	pdfTeX	pdf
luapatex	LuaTeX	pdf
xepatex	XeTeX	pdf
patex	{,pdf,Xe}TeX	pdf/dvi

The invoked engine for patex depends on the first line of the file to be compiled. It must be one of

%\english
%\europe
%\world

where

• %\english invokes Knuth's TeX: Only US American hyphenation, ASCII input and OT1 encoded fonts are supported out of the box and output is dvi only.
• %\europe invokes pdfTeX with e-TeX and extensions. The supported hyphenation patterns are found in the language.def file of the TeX distribution; UTF-8 input for characters based on the Latin alphabet and T1 (Cork) encoded fonts are supported.
• %\world invokes XeTeX. In addition to the above hyphenation patterns, UTF-8 input and OTF/TTF fonts are supported.

Apart from the first line, the document can have the same structure as any plain TeX file, apart from \bye, which is called \thx in PaTeX for the sake of incompatibility.

Features

There aren't many, but there will probably be more in the future. The core depends on the binary used; which files are included in each case is managed by patex.ini.

.tex file	provides
patex-base	catcode setup, register allocation, logos
patex-api	macro programming tools
patex-enc	provides \encode T1 and \encode OT1 font encoding, limited UTF-8 input encoding for 8-bit engines and shorthands to access the glyphs of the fonts
patex-mathenc	mathematics font glyphs shorthands
patex-parameters	TeX's parameters
patex-layout	macros for setting the page dimensions and margins, notably \usepaper{a4}
patex-font	basic font selection tools, with \usefont allowing to load a font x with a corresponding patex/pkg/patex-fonts/patex_font_x.tex file
patex-mac	basic formatting macros
engine/epatex	nearly identical to etex.src, sets up \uselanguage and improved register allocation
engine/pdfpatex	nearly identical to pdfconfig.tex, basic pdf settings
engine/luapatex	nearly identical to luatex.ini, LuaTeX support
engine/xepatex	nearly identical to xetex.ini, support for unicode and line-breaking for CJK

There are also some packages to be \input available in pkg:

package	provides
p-microtype	interface to pdfTeX's micotypography features, like LaTeX's microtype package but much more primitive
p-typewriter	lets a document appear as if written on an old typewriter, with consistent offsets for each character, random boldness, randomly squeezed in letters and a few other things; it makes all letters active so it will only allow one-letter control sequences to be used after it was loaded
texmachine	provides `\parse
patex-fonts	each file sets up the \rm, \bf, \it etc. commands available for a font when loaded with \usefont

Licence

This work is in the public domain.